using. It is made up
of a strange jumble of Eastern languages, grafted on a debased kind of
French, and gabbled with the rapidity of lightning and a great deal of
gesticulation. At a ball you hear far more French than English spoken, and
at a concert I attended lately not a single song was in English. Even in
the Protestant churches there is a special service held in French every
Sunday, as well as another in Tamil, besides the English services; so a
clergyman in Mauritius needs to be a good linguist. The polished floors,
well _frotte_ every morning, and the rather set-out style of the rooms,
all make a house look French. The business of the law-courts and the
newspapers are also in French, with only here and there a column of
English. The notifications of distances, the weights and measures, the
"avis aux voyageurs," the finger-posts, wayside bills, signs on
shop-fronts, are all in French. When by any chance the owner of a shop
breaks out into an English notification of his wares--and it is generally
a Chinaman or Parsee who is fired by this noble ambition--the result is as
difficult to decipher as if it were a cuneiform inscription.

The greatest difference, as it is the one which most affects my individual
comfort, which I have yet found out between Mauritius and an ordinary
English colony is the poverty of the book-shops. Your true creole is not a
reading character, though, on the other hand, he has a great and natural
taste for music. I miss the one or even two excellent book shops where one
could get, at quite reasonable prices too, most of the new and readable
books which I have always found in the chief town of every English colony.
At Cape Town, Christchurch, New Zealand, Maritzburg, D'Urban, there are
far better booksellers than in most English country towns. Here it appears
to me as if the love of literature were confined to the few English
officials, who devour each other's half dozen volumes with an appetite
which speaks terribly of a state of chronic mental famine. I keep hoping
that I shall always be as busy as I am now, and so have very little time
for reading, for if it is ever otherwise I too shall experience the
universal starvation.

BEAU BASSIN, June 20th.

It has never been my lot hitherto, even in all my various wanderings, to
stand of a clear starlight night and see the dear old Plough shining in
the northern sky whilst the Southern Cross rode high in the eastern
heaven. But I can see them bo